Sunday, March 16, 2014

I
have been using Ubuntu since 06.06 and during these years I have found
out that there are certain things in Ubuntu (or any Linux) that will come to you by experience only. Here I am sharing some useful tips and softwares that might help new Ubuntu users.

Home Partition: I will begin with the installation. The most helpful thing I guess will be creating a separate home partition. You can create a home partition of Ext4 format and mount it under /home. This
is recommended because this will help you to reinstall Ubuntu again
without losing any files or settings as you will not need to format the
home partition every time. The partitioning can be done using the Ubuntu
installer or Gparted
available in the Ubuntu installation media. If you use the same home
partition across multiple installations with same username it will work.

Installation on EFI systems: The detailed explanation on how to do this can be seen in my previous post here.

Archive Managers: The major packages that are helpful in creating or opening archives included unzip, unrar, p7zip-full,cabextract, etc. The packages
needed for tar baz2 are preinstalled on Ubuntu. All these packages can
be installed from a terminal using apt-get, aptitude or apt-fast.

Tweaking and Adjusting : Unity tweak tool is very good tools for tweaking the GUI. It can be used to activate hot corners, window spread, window snapping, launcher, panel, etc. There are many other features that can be tweaked with this tool. Other pretty advanced tools are compiz-config-settings-manager and dconf-editor. These two tools have large number of options tweaking which might lead to trouble also.

Download management: Most of the windows users are used to IDM or DAP for download accelaration and management. Downloads can be managed on a command line level using tools like wget, aria2, curl, etc. Flareget
is a pretty good download accelerator and manager. The free version of
the software doesn’t have browser integration and supports only up to 2
connections per download for files bigger than 25 MB. The browser
integration can be achieved in Firefox using the flashgot add-on.

Power and temperature management: Heating
and power management are two other issues in Ubuntu. The problems are
interlinked and can be solved simultaneously. The detailed discussion on this problem is addressed in one of my previous posts.

Intel-AMD dual graphics : This is a serious headache and I don’t know any method to make them work (If anyone knows a method please inform me through comments. I will add it to the text). The AMD-AMD dual graphics works without any problem with fglrx.
This can cause a lot of heating up of system and the only practical
solution I know is to switch off the AMD cards and work with the Intel
cards. The AMD cards can be turned of using the command:

echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch

This can be made permanent by editing the rc.local file in /etcor /etc/rc.d/ folder. Then add the following text to the file before the line 'exit 0'

chown /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch

echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch

If you have receive a ‘No such file or directory’ when running the following command:

‘cat /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch’

then open /etc/fstab and add the following line:

none /sys/kernel/debug debugfs defaults 0 0

Bash History :
The bash history can be accessed by using the history command. But the
default Ubuntu settings has a limit up to which the history is saved.
This can be changed by editing the .bashrc file in home folder. (The file is hidden and can be unhide by pressing Ctrl+H). The values of following two lines must be kept empty

HISTSIZE=

HISTFILESIZE=

Bleachbit :This is a tool similar to Ccleaner in windows. This a very powerful tool which can be run as sudo to clean the caches of APT, X11 etc. The normal user can clean the browser and
other application caches. Please be sure to tick only those things you
want to clear. There is option to clean bash history also which may be
bad for many people who use history in terminal.

Open in terminal :
The open in terminal extension available for nautilus is a very useful
tool. This helps to add a open in terminal option to the right click
menu and can start a terminal from any location. The package can be
installed by using the command :

Creating a launcher :
Certain applications installed doesn’t have a launcher by default. This
problem can be solved by creating a launcher by yourself. The launcher
is created as a file something.desktop and is to be placed under
~/.local/share/applications and need to be marked as executable. The following is an example content of a launcher. The Name will be displayed in dash with the Icon mentioned. The Exec will have the command to be excecuted

Movie and Music :
The codecs can be installed to play all audio and video from the
default movie player. The codecs can be found in synaptic package
manager by searching the keyword gstreamer.
The players like VLC can also be installed. For playing music I prefer
clementine which offers music library, file browsing and playlist
features. For audio editing softwares like audacity can be used.

Mounting NTFS filesystemspermenantly: This can be done by editing the fstab file in /etc. By adding a line like this you can mount them during boot. The UUID can be found from gparted or running the command 'sudoblkid'.

UUID=xxxxxxxxxxx mount path ntfsdefults,umask=007,gid=46 0 0

Apt-fast :Apt-fast
is an alternative to apt-get which can download the packages using
multiple connections by using download managers like aria2.

Kernel Parameters: Installation
of Ubuntu in a system with Graphics card (mostly when you have dual
graphics card) many times it fails to boot into GUI. The system will
boot up to a low graphics mode or tty. In this case the system can be booted into GUI using the parameter 'nomodset'. If the system fails to boot into GUI and instead it boots to tty the problem can be solved using the parameter 'vt.handoff=7'.

Brightness Control: If the brightness control is not working then it can be solved by adding boot parameters.This can be done by editing the file /etc/default/grub. There will be something like:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"Change it toGRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_backlight=vendor"Save the file and run the command sudo update-grub and reboot.

If you want anything else to be added to this post please inform me by comments. I will incorporate them if I know how to do it